Your Past Deals Are Lying to You

A seller was certain his plant manager contact could sign an $800,000 order, because that contact had signed every deal before it. Here's the question I asked him in the deal review, and why account history can quietly work against you.

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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

When we're managing an opportunity inside an account that we already know, and maybe an account that you've sold countless opportunities to before, we have to make sure that we don't bump into assumptions that we've made based on past experience.

Let me give you an example. A customer I was working with in a live deal review was insistent that their contact, a middle manager, a plant manager inside a facility, had the final signing authority on an $800,000 opportunity. Why? Because he had signed off on every other opportunity before that.

Which makes sense, until you dig into the history. The previous opportunities were all $50,000, $100,000, maybe one at $150,000. But they weren't $800,000, which is almost an order of magnitude bigger than those other opportunities.

So I got thinking. Do you think the customer might have a different procurement procedure for opportunities of that size?

He insisted no. I said, what's the downside of asking?

"Well, we might have to get procurement involved." Well, what if we don't get procurement involved? "They'll probably go to RFP if they get upset about that."

You've got to be curious. Sure, absolutely use your history with that account to inform your next step. But it's your job to spot distinctions in the sale you're trying to close now versus the sale you were trying to close a year ago. If that distinction is one of volume, especially eight times or ten times the volume, you've got to think the process could be different.

And that could make all the difference between you winning the deal, losing the deal, or having the deal delayed.